1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a scheme for managing a network utilizing information outlets in a home network environment.
2. Description of the Background Art
In recent years, there is a rapid trend for digitalizing electronic devices as exemplified by advances of the multi-media technology, and this trend is already noticeable in the office environment.
In terms of hardware, this trend has been materialized in forms of introduction of PCs, digitalization of OA devices and formation of networks among them. Also, in terms of software, this trend has been expanding to cover the basic functions of hosts (which are progressively light-sized and transferred to PCs), the application software such as the word-processing software, the spreadsheet software, etc., and the Internet application such as the WWW.
The similar trend can also be seen in the home environment for home use devices and related fields. Namely, even in the home environment, this trend for digitalization has been steadily progressed in forms of digitalization of AV devices (DVD, digital VTR, digital video camera, etc.), digitalization of broadcasting, and Internet access such as OCN.
This trend of technological innovations that has started from the office environment is expected to progress toward the formation of networks in future. Namely, it is expected that the technologies of various fields such as information processing, communication and broadcasting will be unified by the digitalization, and inter-mixed with each other by the formation of networks.
There are many candidates for the network technologies that provide the bases for this trend. For example, the Ethernet has overwhelming records of the actual use in the office environment and is probably the most promising candidate even for the home PC network. Also, the ATM is another serious contender because of the general consensus among the infra-structure constructors (telephone companies, CATV companies, etc.) to keep constructing the infra-structures based on this technology in view of the advantageous characteristics of the ATM such as its fast, real-time, and wide bandwidth properties.
In addition to these candidates, the network technology (bus technology) called IEEE 1394 has been attracting much attentions recently. This IEEE 1394 has several remarkable characteristics such as its fast, real-time (QOS guaranteed), and plug-and-play properties, so that there is a high expectation especially among the AV industries on the IEEE 1394 as the most promising candidate for a future scheme for inter-connecting digital AV devices. This vogue has also instigated much interests to the IEEE 1394 from the computer industries as well.
In the initial phase, it is expected that the inter-connection of the home use digital devices by these various network technologies will be realized in conjunction with the spread of the home use digital devices, depending on preferences and demands of the users, and in this way prototype digital networks will be gradually built up inside each home. When these digital networks become more widespread, it is conceivable that a home will come to be equipped with “information outlets” in the similar manner as the electric outlets commonly found in our homes today.
Namely, similarly as the currently used electric outlets, dedicated outlets for the purpose of making connections to the home network will be provided at each room or any other convenient location within a home. These information outlets are inter-connected either directly or via bridges behind the wall, for example, so as to provide an infrastructure capable of easily realizing things like “AV data transfer from this room to that room”.
In the IEEE 1394 mentioned above, in order to realize such information outlets, the so called “long haul 1394” which is capable of ensuring a cable length of over 50 meters is currently under the discussion, and its use in realization of the domestic information outlets will be quite promising.
Now, in the current network management, the network configuration information (such as an information regarding a node that exists in the network or an information regarding a service that is provided in the network, for example) is discriminated according to MAC address, IP address, host name (domain name) or the like that is assigned to each node, and displayed on a screen of the network management terminal and the like. In general, the network manager is an expert in the network art so that he basically encounters no difficulty in a situation like that.
However, in the home network, actual nodes will be the home use devices such as TV, VTR and camera, and it is quite difficult to expect a general home use device user to be capable of handling such a node management and a network management that requires the naming of these nodes by domain names or even worse discriminating these nodes according to MAC addresses.
What seems the most simple and convenient way of doing the same in the home network is to relate locations and devices, as in “the TV on the second floor”, “the DVD in the reception room”, and so on. This way is intuitively easy to comprehend speaking from our everyday life experiences.
However, it has been difficult to realize this because of the following problem. Namely, in the link layer network technologies most notably represented by IEEE 1394 and Ethernet, there is a concept of node “connection” but there is not concept of node “location”. Namely, it is possible to recognize things like “this node is connected to the network” or “the node A is connected next to the node B”, but there has been simply no way of recognizing a physical location at which the node is actually located in such a manner as “this node is located in the reception room”.
For this reason, it has been impossible to present the nodes in relation to their physical locations to the user, or identify nodes in relation to their physical location, for example, and this fact has been the major obstacle in constructing a home network in which the simplification of a network management is indispensable.